Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has broken eight of his 30 campaign promises and achieved only unsatisfactory results for another 14, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) said yesterday, questioning Ko’s capability as mayor.
After Ko on Monday unveiled a report enumerating his achievements in office, Yao, who has announced his bid for Taipei mayor in next year’s local elections, called a news conference to review Ko’s three years in office.
Ko has failed to realize the i-Voting system, public participation in budgeting, social housing and subsidies, public long-term care services, public childcare services, music industry improvement, establishing cultural industry infrastructure and independent cultural policy formation process, Yao said.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The mayor has failed to achieve tangible results in 14 other pledges, including improving on-campus food safety, reorganizing bus routes, initiating government-led urban renewal, establishing affordable kindergartens, improving community daycare services, improving police management and public security, building energy efficient infrastructures and improving the business environment, Yao added.
The i-Voting system, one of Ko’s principal policies, created an online polling platform allowing people to submit proposals on issues to be voted on by the public, but only 29 proposals have been voted via the platform, all of which were launched by government agencies, Yao said.
The system is designed to improve transparency in policymaking and government management, but the city government rejected all of the four resident-initiated proposals and refused to hold any public hearings about controversies surrounding the construction of the Taipei Dome, he added.
“While Ko has advocated transparency, his behind-the-door dealings in the Taipei Dome case and his boasting of a close relationship with top DPP officials have suggested his authoritarian mindset,” Yao said.
Ko’s proposal to build walls around government agencies against protesters following a protest on Saturday suggests that he “has forgotten how he gained power,” Yao added.
While Ko promised to build 50,000 public housing units in two terms, only 3,453 units can be completed by the end of his first term, while the availability of public housing remains low, Yao said.
Ko has pledged to increase public childcare capacity, but the city has only 18 public childcare centers serving 216 children, accounting for only 0.3 percent of children aged up to two in the city, he said.
Taipei had only 18 daycare centers serving 619 elderly people and 17 house care centers providing services to 3,724 people in the first half of this year, suggesting insufficient service capacity, Yao said.
While Ko has promised to shorten bus lines to make them more frequent and reliable, he has only increased the frequency of four popular bus lines without reorganizing bus traffic, he said.
“What can Ko’s administration guarantee other than imperfection and fraud?” Yao said.
Ko has achieved satisfying results in six policies, including establishing a family physician system and at-home medical services, which are associated with his background in medical practice, Yao said.
In response, Ko said that he is open to criticism and willing to make improvements to improve the city, adding that he is thankful to Yao for “volunteering as a director of a research, development and evaluation commission” to provide an appraisal free of charge.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching